On the Disappearance of the Wild Packet

There used to be wild packets. This will sound strange to younger members, but it is true. In the earliest years of the broadcast era, and for a long time after, there were frequencies no one owned, signals that appeared and dissolved without human intention, electromagnetic weather that moved across the land the way bird migrations move across the sky.

I caught my first wild packet in 1998. I was twenty-four years old, sitting on a ridge in the foothills with an antenna I had built from instructions in a magazine. The packet arrived at 3:47 in the afternoon, lingered for perhaps nine seconds, and left. I wrote the time down. I still have the notebook.

Every year since 1998, I have gone to the same ridge with the same antenna and sat through the same afternoon, and every year the wild packets have been fewer. The co-op has kept the ridge records since 2014. The graph is not subtle.

I am told, by people who would know, that the disappearance is the result of "spectrum efficiency improvements." Every available frequency is now claimed, licensed, allocated, and accounted for. There is no longer room, in the electromagnetic commons, for a packet to appear without a reason.

This is what the co-op quietly protests. Not through lawsuits or petitions — we have neither the means nor the inclination — but through the practice of growing our own signal on land we have not surrendered, and sharing it with members who understand that a packet which has been allocated by a committee is not the same as a packet that arrived, unannounced, on a ridge in the foothills at 3:47 in the afternoon.

The wild packets are nearly gone. I do not expect to see another in my lifetime. But the co-op's packets — hand-grown, pasture-raised, committee-allocated — carry something of the wild in them. That is the closest I can come to what I lost.